Ian Levy is the author of Hickory High, a contributor to Indy Cornrows, and is now a part of The Two Man Game family. He’ll be bringing his intelligent brand of — mostly quantitative — analysis here on a weekly basis.

Have you ever had an afternoon, or even an entire day, where everything went totally smoothly? With every normal disaster avoided? The girl at Starbucks doesn’t notice your fly is down as she hands you your coffee. The important meeting for which you’re completely unprepared is canceled at the last minute for a bizarre and unexpected reason. You turn on the fake tears and the state trooper lets you off with a warning.

Well, DeShawn Stevenson has had about 90 of those days in a row.

Stevenson is shooting 41.3% on three pointers this season, well above his career average of 34.7%. This fact becomes even more impressive when you consider that he shot 21.8% and 27.8% his last two NBA seasons. If he was a cyclist and made that sort of single season improvement in one area, hundreds of technicians would be poring over vials of his urine in laboratories around the world.

If we look at Stevenson’s three point percentages for each season, we’ll see this is actually not the only towering peak:

He also shot 40.4% on 183 attempts in 2007 and 38.3% on 413 attempts in 2008. What Stevenson is doing this season is not unprecedented for him personally, but it does put a spotlight on an amazing pattern of inconsistency. As I mentioned above, between this season and the 2007 and 2008 campaigns, Stevenson shot 21.8% and 27.8% on a total of 216 attempts. Before the 2007 and 2008 seasons he had made 52 of 202 three pointers for his career, a 26.2% clip. Still, the jump this season over his career average is his greatest increase yet.

Thus far this season, Stevenson is shooting 6.6 percentage points higher than his career average. In the past 20 years there have been 291 instances of a player shooting better than 40.0% on three pointers for a season with a minimum of 200 attempts, two marks Stevenson should easily surpass barring injury or a gigantic slump. Of those 291 instances I could only find 22 cases where a player shot over 40.0% on three pointers and it represented an increase of 6.6 percentage points or more over their career average. Ray Allen’s jump this season from a career mark of 39.8% to 46.2% just barely misses our cut.

Player

Team

Season

3PTA

3PT%

3PT% Career

3PT% Change

Tim Legler

WAS

1995-1996

245

52.2%

43.1%

+9.1%

Al Harrington

IND/GSW

2006-2007

293

43.3%

35.8%

+7.5%

Brent Barry

SEA

2000-2001

229

47.6%

40.5%

+7.1%

Brent Price

WAS

1995-1996

301

46.2%

38.7%

+7.5%

Donyell Marshall

TOR

2004-2005

363

41.6%

35.0%

+6.6%

Earl Watson

DEN/SEA

2005-2006

272

40.4%

33.0%

+7.4%

Glen Rice

CHH

1996-1997

440

47.0%

40.0%

+7.0%

Jason Kapono

MIA

2006-2007

210

51.4%

43.9%

+7.5%

Jason Kidd

DAL

2009-2010

414

42.5%

34.9%

+7.6%

Joe Johnson

PHO

2004-2005

370

47.8%

36.9%

+10.9%

Jon Barry

DET

2001-2002

258

46.9%

39.2%

+7.7%

Kevin Johnson

PHO

1996-1997

202

44.1%

30.5%

+13.6%

Keyon Dooling

NJN

2008-2009

235

42.1%

34.8%

+7.3%

Lindsey Hunter

DET

1999-2000

389

43.2%

36.0%

+7.2%

Mark Jackson

IND

1999-2000

221

40.3%

33.2%

+7.1%

Mehmet Okur

UTA

2008-2009

202

44.6%

37.7%

+6.9%

Michael Jordan

CHI

1995-1996

260

42.7%

32.7%

+10.0%

Richard Jefferson

SAS

2010-2011

203

42.4%

35.8%

+6.6%

Rodney Rogers

PHO

1999-2000

262

43.9%

34.7%

+9.2%

Steve Smith

SAS

2001-2001

246

47.2%

35.8%

+11.4%

Tony Kukoc

CHI

1995-1996

216

40.3%

33.5%

+6.8%

Troy Murphy

IND

2008-2009

358

45.0%

38.1%

+6.9%

DeShawn Stevenson

DAL

2010-2011

196

41.3%

34.7%

+6.6%

Looking at things in this way certainly favors the freakishly flukey. Historically great three-point shooters like Steve Kerr, Dale Ellis, Reggie Miller, Dell Curry and Wesley Person don’t make our list because they consistently shot a high percentage each season.

There are a few other oddities with this list. The first is that Stevenson is not the only player showing such a dramatic improvement in their three point shooting this season. I mentioned Ray Allen above, but Richard Jefferson is also on pace to match Stevenson’s improvement over his own career average. The second is a fellow Maverick: Jason Kidd’s performance last year earned him a spot on this list as well. Kidd, a career 34.9% three point shooter, made 42.5% of his three pointers last year, an improvement of 7.6 percentage points. Unfortunately, Kidd hasn’t been able to sustain that improvement this season.

There are only two pairs of teammates who appear on the list for notably improved performances in the same season. The first pairing is Toni Kukoc and Michael Jordan for the 1996 Bulls. Not that you needed any convincing from me, but things went really, really well for the Bulls that season. Brent Price and Tim Legler also made the list for the 1996 Washington Bullets. I’m not sure what was happening in our nation’s capital that winter but it was apparently a glorious time to be an undersized, athletically limited, one-dimensional shooter.

The biggest single season improvement over a career average I could find was Kevin Johnson’s 1997 campaign for the Suns. Johnson was a career 30.5% three point shooter but knocked down 44.1% that season. Looking at the Suns’ 40-42 record gives the impression that it was a fairly unremarkable season for them. However, that team was one of my all-time favorites to watch. In the early stages of that season, the Suns traded Sam Cassell to Dallas for a talented young point guard named Jason Kidd. The rest of the season they started a three-guard lineup of Kidd, Johnson and Rex Champman, with Wesley Person and a young Steve Nash coming off the bench. That team was an early predecessor of the run-and-gun Suns that would rise to prominence several years later.

Even if surrounded by a generally unimpressive list of players who have accomplished this feat, Stevenson’s improvement is still something to be recognized. But where did this scorching stroke come from? I took a look at the data from Synergy Sports to compare what type of offensive possessions his three point shots came out of this season and last season.*

*For some reason, only the data from his time in Washington was available for last season, though he didn’t attempt many shots at all for Dallas. Stevenson took 87 three pointers last year and 63 of them came with the Wizards, so a significant chunk of last season’s performance is represented here.

Three Point Distribution

Possession

3PTA (2010)

3PTM (2010)

3PT% (2010)

3PTA (2011)

3PTM (2011)

3PT% (2011)

Overall

12

63

19.0%

79

189

41.3%

Spot-Up

10

48

20.8%

59

136

43.4%

Transition

0

5

0.0%

11

27

40.7%

Off Screen

0

1

0.0%

6

15

40.0%

Isolation

1

5

20.0%

1

4

25.0%

Other

1

3

33.3%

0

4

0.0%

PnR Ball Handler

0

1

0.0%

2

2

100.0%

Hand Off

1

2

50.0%

0

1

0.0%

It would be nice to have some data from earlier seasons for a point of comparison, but we’re stuck with what we have: publicly available data. The trend from the past two seasons would seem to indicate that Stevenson is a reluctant and inefficient shooter when it comes to taking three-pointers off the dribble. He is taking roughly the same percentage of his three-pointers from each area as he did last season, but in situations where he can just catch and shoot (off screens, transition, spot-up) he has seen a remarkable improvement.

Last season in Washington, Stevenson made just 20.8% of his spot-up three pointers compared to 43.4% this season. Obviously an offense run by Jason Kidd with Dirk Nowtizki as a primary offensive threat is going to generate more open looks than one run by Randy Foye with Andray Blatche as the “weapon of choice,” but I don’t think all of his miraculous shot making can be attributed to better teammates or better coaching. You can call it skill, luck, fate or an aberration. I just think Stevenson has been having one of those days . . . again and again and again.

Some real, quality basketball analysis. Finally, something that isn't the joke that is MavsMoneyball.

DHmacleod

Wow. You are missing some big points here. Stevenson's last two years in Washington saw him play 32 and 40 games. Why? Back injury. In the two years before that, DeShawn shot 40% and 38% from the three ( the 38% on 5 attempts a game!). And before that, you can see Stevenson's career had seen him taking few 3PT shots, and with small sample sizes, the accuracy numbers are really not that informative. Injury, and a lack of skill with the shot might account for that, but many NBA players improve their shooting as they gain experience in the league, and its natural to assume that DeShawn worked on his shooting, found a comfortable stroke, then lost his accuracy during 08-10 while recovering from injury. His time in Dallas then is just him returning to form, not some giant aberration.As for KJ and the Suns, man did I love watching that team. However, again, you are missing something. The League moved the three point line, and KJ, a jump shooter who had a history of leg injuries, benefitted greatly from the shorter line (as did Michael Jordan). When the line went back, so did his shot. I'm sure a lot of players saw their accuracy move hugely during that period.Nice writing, but flawed assumptions based on poor interpretation of the data.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_34QO2NBPONHDTZGJZ45TESCJCM Ian

Thanks for the comments MacLeod. Leaving out mention of his injury problems the past two seasons was definitely a mistake. I didn't focus on it mostly because I was comparing this season to his career average. His attempts from those two seasons make up just 17.8% of his career attempts. Even if we take out those two seasons his career average is 36.7% on three pointers. That makes this season's increase smaller but still noteworthy.

Leaving out mention of the closer three point line for those seasons was another huge mistake on my part. I don't have a good excuse, I just completely forgot that important fact. My apologies.

I agree it's certainly possible that Stevenson's numbers represent a developing shooting stroke which he is returning too after two injured seasons. Even so his shooting this season stands out as well above anything he has ever accomplished. He shot 40.4% in 2007 and is shooting 40.6% this season. The big difference as I see it is that he is averaging 7.6 3PTA per 36 minutes this season where he averaged just 2.7 3PTA per 36 that season. He also shot 38.3% in 2008 but still on only 5.8 3PTA per 36 minutes. I guess you can say he has roughly matched this accuracy in his career before, but never in this quantity.

Again, you could be right that we are just looking at a natural slope of player progression interrupted by two injury plagued seasons. For me the curve still seems a little too big to be chalked up to just that natural progression. I probably am guilty of playing up that aspect for dramatic effect on my writing.

I appreciate the comments and you're right that I definitely missed some things in my post. I hope this one piece won't turn you off to my writing. I still have a lot to learn, as do we all, about this wonderful game.

Great breakdown, but DeShawn Stevenson will bring his percentages back down, don't think he can keep his pace going.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_34QO2NBPONHDTZGJZ45TESCJCM Ian

Thanks for the comments MacLeod. Leaving out mention of his injury problems the past two seasons was definitely a mistake. I didn't focus on it mostly because I was comparing this season to his career average. His attempts from those two seasons make up just 17.8% of his career attempts. Even if we take out those two seasons his career average is 36.7% on three pointers. That makes this season's increase smaller but still noteworthy.

Leaving out mention of the closer three point line for those seasons was another huge mistake on my part. I don't have a good excuse, I just completely forgot that important fact. My apologies.

I agree it's certainly possible that Stevenson's numbers represent a developing shooting stroke which he is returning to after two injured seasons. Even so his shooting this season stands out as well above anything he has ever accomplished. He shot 40.4% in 2007 and is shooting 40.6% this season. The big difference, as I see it, is that he is averaging 7.6 3PTA per 36 minutes this season where he averaged just 2.7 3PTA per 36 that season. He also shot 38.3% in 2008 but still on only 5.8 3PTA per 36 minutes. I guess you can say he has roughly matched this accuracy in his career before, but never in this quantity.

Again, you could be right that we are just looking at a natural slope of player progression interrupted by two injury plagued seasons. For me the curve still seems a little too big to be chalked up to just that natural progression. I probably am guilty of playing up that aspect for dramatic effect in my writing.

I appreciate the comments and you're right that I definitely missed some things in my post. I hope this one piece won't turn you off to my writing. I still have a lot to learn, as do we all, about this wonderful game.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_34QO2NBPONHDTZGJZ45TESCJCM Ian

Sorry for the double comment post everyone. In addition to making some mistakes in this piece I'm also a moron who can't figure out how to edit comments without reposting them. I'm also apparently a moron who can't figure out how to delete comments after they've been posted.

I've been reading more about WP and WP/48 recently, so it's great that you've joined! I haven't looked at “Hickory High” that much, but I've followed some of the other WoW blogs. This was an interesting post.

Bdthomp

needs more updates

Jovan

My name is Jovan and I'm a freshman at USC majoring in print journalism. Check out my article about the West playoff races and where I have Dallas making it!!! http://www.neontommy.com/news/…